Although I've tried both CD-R and CD-RW media, I have been unable to save Puppy's on-going sessions. The first session and any changes I make save, but subsequent saves result in CD drive error messages.

Well, today I've been able to save 2 sessions using the CD-R I burned. I downloaded and installed Firefox, imported my bookmarks, and maricle of wonders, the session saved! I also saved a second session, to make a grand total of 3 saved sessions.

But now I'm getting the same old error once again when I try to save additional sessions. It seems this is an intermittent problem, but I'll be darned if I can determine what makes the difference between being able to save a session or not.

nduanetesh posted a solution in the multi-session section of the forum...
a hardware or bios limitation prevented the cd from booting if it has more than one track on it. He used a usb pen drive to start the boot process.

This doesn't sound like the same problem I was having, but I do think I might have some insight into this...

What it sounds like to me is that you are having the "Premature EOF" problem, which is normally because your directories are too deep. Following the instructions in the thread you linked to above may help you around this. Using the -D option in etc/rc.reboot seems to be helpful. Give it a shot and see if it works...

BUT

It might not, and I'll tell you why...(this took me a while to figure out)

(Let me preface this by saying I've identified this problem with mozilla mail, but it could also crop up in other programs...)

If you're using mozilla mail, when you create your account, a folder is created in the .mozilla directory, given a name you specify for "name of account". Inside this folder are created files, Inbox, Sent, etc. Now, a little later on mozilla will/may ask you if you'd like to create a set of "Local Folders", which I believe keep backups or copies or amalgamate your mail or something. I have admit that I didn't read the dialogue box carefully before I clicked "OK". So, a second set of Inbox, Sent, etc files are created, inside of the folder "Local Folders" in the .mozilla directory. And there's your problem. You've now got two sets of VERY deep folders which have nearly identical names. If you watch the text scrolling very fast when you are shutting down, you'll see a pile of errors which read something like:

You'll see a pile of these, one for every file which exists in both Local Folders and Your Account Name. I think (but am not absolutely positive) that because of the mkisofs errors created by these files, mkisofs fails and your session cannot be burned. I tried everything I could to change/remove the "Local Folders" directory, but couldn't. I ended up burning a new multisession puppy CD and have been using sylpheed as my mail program. The problem has not popped up again.

Well, I burned a new Puppy CD, booted it pressing "5' on the keyboard, and made sure not to open Mozilla Mail. I set everything up (Firefox, favorites, etc.), and powered off. And once again, the dreaded "premature EOF on stdin" error appeared, and I lost all my work. Dang!

This single feature ... the ability to save your configurations to CD ... makes Puppy so attractive, and for me it is the most valuable feature of all in this distro. I'm eagerly awaiting the next release, when hopefully this bug will be quashed. Meanwhile I've got about 6 Puppy CDs with varying amounts of saved configurations on them.

You linked to another thread which mentions adding a "-D" command to your rc.reboot file, to handle long file names. You are doing that, aren't you? And you are aware that rc.reboot is overwritten every time you reboot, so you either have to manually change the file every time you boot, or you have to set up a script to do it for you, such as Barry mentioned in that thread.

You are doing all of that, right? If you install firefox but don't add the -D to your rc.reboot file, you will get a "premature EOF" error and the boot will fail, no doubt about it.

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